In 2009, Jan Koum developed an app intended to make users’ status visible to their contacts. The app was named WhatsApp, a name that sounds like “What’s up?”, a common way people ask about each other’s status.

Later, the developers added a messaging function.

In the 2010s, the spread of smartphones and mobile internet access allowed people to “connect on the go,”¹ creating the conditions for the rise of Over-The-Top (OTT) mobile messaging services. Unlike traditional Short Message Service (SMS), OTT messaging services generally do not charge a per-message fee and offer enhanced content-sharing features, such as photos, videos, audio files, and GIFs. They also support persistent group chats. These features helped WhatsApp gain widespread popularity and become one of the leading mobile messaging services.

In 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. The acquisition marked an important moment. As messaging services became central to everyday communication, controlling these services meant influencing communication within a large and growing user network.

Facebook monetizes its services primarily through advertising. It relies heavily on user-generated content and social advertising, a form of display advertising characterized by high levels of user engagement and frequent interaction. To support this model, Facebook collects data about users both on its own platform and across the wider internet, using this information to target behavioral advertisements.²

After the acquisition, WhatsApp continued to grow rapidly. By 2025, it had more than three billion monthly active users, and the flow of messages on its servers was estimated to hover between one and two million per second.³

Over time, WhatsApp also introduced some new features that went beyond its original messaging function—“no ads, no games, and no gimmicks.” In 2023, the company launched Channels in the Updates tab, allowing brands and celebrities to broadcast information to followers. In the summer of 2025, WhatsApp introduced advertisements to the app, also within the Updates tab.

This was not always the case. In its earlier form, WhatsApp functioned more as a system for maintaining everyday social presence. As one commentator observes: “WhatsApp is phatic before it is anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app’s servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing.”⁴

The notion of phatic communication can be traced back to the work of the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. He observed that much everyday speech functions not to transmit ideas but to sustain social relations. Malinowski described this form of interaction as “phatic communion,” emphasizing the human need for the presence of others.⁵

Although communication technologies have changed, the expectation of social presence has not disappeared. In modern society, being reachable has increasingly become a social norm. People often assume that others are socially present and available.

This expectation appears in many kinds of relationships. In romantic relationships, partners may wish the other person to be there all the time. In professional settings, missing a message for only a short time can quickly trigger follow-up calls.

I experienced this myself when my parents did not respond to my messages as usual. I immediately became afraid that something bad might have happened. When I called them, however, I simply found two happy people enjoying the sunshine by the riverside.

Within relationships structured by social presence, responding to messages becomes a social question in itself. Malinowski already observed that in phatic communication, silence may be interpreted not merely as unfriendliness but as a sign of bad character.⁶

In contemporary messaging environments, this expectation takes new forms. When someone knows that their message has been read, the question is no longer simply whether to respond, but how to respond.

Sometimes the question concerns the form of reply itself. Some people prefer to send a rapid sequence of short messages rather than a single carefully written paragraph. What has been described as utterance chunking—sending multiple brief messages without waiting for a reply—is often perceived as more emotionally engaging than a smoothly punctuated block of text.⁷

For some individuals, sending messages can feel easier than speaking face-to-face, allowing them to express thoughts or emotions more freely. Yet the absence of tone, gesture, and immediate feedback also makes misunderstandings more likely than in spoken conversations.

Messaging does not only involve sending messages but also waiting for responses. The act of waiting itself can produce anxiety. Many people repeatedly check their phones or refresh conversations in the hope of receiving a reply, allowing messaging interactions to occupy time that might otherwise belong to themselves.

Recently, another form of mediated presence has begun to appear. Some people now turn to large language models to discuss their thoughts or sadness without worrying about disturbing others. Because these systems are always available, users can initiate conversations without the social expectations that typically accompany messaging.

The growing role of AI within messaging apps is already raising regulatory concerns. In December 2025, the European Commission decided to initiate antitrust proceedings over an update to the terms of WhatsApp Business Application Programming Interface (API), which could prevent “third-party AI providers from offering their services through WhatsApp while Meta’s own AI service would remain available.”⁸

As more and more communication moves into apps and AI chatbots, those who control them gain enormous power over our presence.

When the European Commission approved Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, it viewed the consumer communications app market as competitive. The Commission noted that numerous rival apps existed—including Line, Viber, iMessage, Telegram, WeChat, and Google Hangouts—and that users could use multiple apps simultaneously and switch between them easily. The market was also described as “very dynamic,” with rapid innovation cycles in which launching a new app required little time or investment, and market positions could quickly change.⁹

When Facebook notified the acquisition in 2014, it also informed the European Commission that it would be unable to establish reliable automated matching between Facebook and WhatsApp user accounts. Two years later, however, WhatsApp updated its terms of service to allow the linking of users’ phone numbers with Facebook identities. In 2017, the European Commission concluded that Facebook had provided misleading information during the merger review and imposed a €110 million fine.¹⁰

In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sued Meta, arguing that Facebook had monopoly power in personal social networking and that its acquisition of WhatsApp unlawfully helped maintain that monopoly.

As discussed in the previous essay, on November 18, 2025, the District Court for the District of Columbia held in FTC v. Meta that Meta does not possess monopoly power in the market defined as “Personal Social Networking” (PSN).

When Jan Koum thought of a person being online, he pictured his grandfather leafing through an address book.¹¹

When I was a child, on the way back to my hometown for Chinese New Year, my dad would drive while my mom went through her contact list. Together, we composed blessing messages and sent them to friends and colleagues.

This year, when I returned home, we were lying in bed asking DeepSeek to write the greetings for us. At one point, someone accidentally sent the prompt he meant for the AI—“write a New Year greeting for me”—to the WeChat group chat, and we all burst out laughing.

Perhaps this, too, is another form of presence.

Sources

  1. Federal Trade Commission v Facebook, First Amended Complaint (US District Court for the District of Columbia, 19 August 2021).
  2. Federal Trade Commission v Facebook, First Amended Complaint (US District Court for the District of Columbia, 19 August 2021).
  3. Sam Knight, ‘Hey There! How WhatsApp Took Over the Global Conversation’ The New Yorker (19 January 2026) 15.
  4. Knight, 13.
  5. Knight, 13.
  6. Knight, 14.
  7. Knight, 14.
  8. European Commission, Exclusion of AI competitors from WhatsApp (Case AT.41034, 4 December 2025) https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/cases/AT.41034, accessed 8 March 2026.
  9. European Commission, ‘Mergers: Commission approves acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook’ (3 October 2014) https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_1088 accessed 8 March 2026.
  10. European Commission, ‘Mergers: Commission fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover’ (18 May 2017) https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_1369 accessed 8 March 2026.
  11. Knight, 13.